Walter Gropius und Adolf Meyer (design), Contribution to the Competition for the Chicago Tribune Office Building, 1922 / Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Walter Gropius und Adolf Meyer (design), Contribution to the Competition for the Chicago Tribune Office Building, 1922 Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin

Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer, Contribution to the Competition for the Chicago Tribune Office Building, 1922

The design by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer for the Chicago Tribune Tower has now achieved canonical status in modern architecture. It brought the Gropius/Meyer office international renown. Looking back in 1958, Gropius himself explained, ‘When I designed the Chicago Tribune Tower in 1922, I wanted to construct a building that would absolutely avoid using any sort of historical style and instead would express the modern age using modern means – in this case with a reinforced concrete skeleton that was intended to express the building’s functions clearly.’ Although elements such as the balconies have a rather decorative effect and by no means correspond to the functionality of an office building, the design nevertheless became a symbol of the New Architecture and of Bauhaus architecture.

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